


She Crumbles Like Tenochtitlan

by remembertowrite



Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: Angst, Dysfunctional Relationships, Emotional Manipulation, Episode Tag: 202 Think No Evil Speak No Evil, F/M, Manipulative Strand, POV Multiple, Pining, Pining Alex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-08
Updated: 2016-02-08
Packaged: 2018-05-19 01:25:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5950969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remembertowrite/pseuds/remembertowrite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alex Reagan: Curious to a fault. Richard Strand: Vulnerable and desperate to the brink of madness.</p><p>The result: The fallout of a reporter getting too close to her story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	She Crumbles Like Tenochtitlan

Richard Strand has become such a strange presence in her life that she is simultaneously surprised and not surprised when he rings her buzzer at 11:30pm on a Tuesday.

“Alex,” he says into the speaker. It’s all he says, but the smooth baritone of his voice finds the balance between the weak pleading and entitled demand that bends her will to his. She buzzes him up without hesitation, eminently concerned for his welfare; she’s gleaned an unsteady air from him, just listening to him murmur her name like a forgotten lover’s.

Scruffy and unkempt in faded gray and blue plaid, two black sneakers weighing heavily on her doormat, Strand fingers the strap of an old leather messenger bag (which she registers as something distinctly more Strand-like than the rest of his untidy appearance), and he lets himself in without so much as a hello.

“It’s been a few days since you last called,” she remarks, her troubled attempts at falling asleep pushed aside. It should strike her as strange that Strand is here so late, but his behavior has been so erratic that nothing seems to faze her anymore, at least concerning him.

He drops the messenger bag carelessly onto her couch. It emits a muffled thud on impact with the green patchwork quilt her mother made her for Christmas. Strand sits and starts rifling through his things; he addresses her without tearing his eyes away from what she assumes must be a quite labyrinthine interior for a messenger bag.

“Where are you on Thomas Warren and Dava Corp?” his clipped voice inquires. It’s grammatically a question but sounds more like a command.

She closes her door, appreciating the satisfying _clunk_ of the deadbolt. She takes the ten steps across her living room to the couch. To him. She lowers her body and balances on the balls of her feet so she’s at his level, her hand resting on the edge of the coffee table. The feel of the smooth pine steadies her as she stays genuflected before him.

“Are you okay?” she asks, concern further marring the world-weariness of her insomniac visage.

Strand’s cool blue eyes flick toward her. “Thomas Warren,” he urges her.

“Where have you been? Are you okay?”

He stops rustling through his bag long enough to rest a hand on her shoulder. It’s not unwelcome, but it grips her with a little more pressure than she’s anticipating. Strand has almost never touched her in the year of knowing him (a year that stretches into millennia, if she looks at the woman she was before all this, before she learned that shadow creatures could stalk and pray on children, that something as clinical as mathematics could touch the divine depths of hell).

“Alex, please.” The way his voice melts on her first name, thawed water droplets dribbling down into pools of despondency, inspires an overwhelming—almost _nauseating_ —wave of empathy that crests and breaks on her encumbered back.

She exhales, savoring the warmth and weight of his hand on her shoulder, the double-edged sweetness of a man counting on her competence so thoroughly that he expects her to have all the answers.

“I went to the location of the not-for-profit that Nic dug up.”

“And?” He stares down at her like a great horned owl (and she, the mouse).

“The person at the front desk told me Dava Corp used to have meetings on the first floor. There was also some sort of research lab there at some point.”

His quick nod dissatisfies her; she’s expecting him to be more excited about this development.

“Did you look over the first floor?”

“I wasn’t able to get in.”

A frown drags down the corners of his mouth, and she defends herself: “The place has been cleared out for years. Also, I did get the building super’s number.” His eyebrows arch up in interest at that.

She hears the turning of the deadbolt, the creaking of the apartment door, and Strand’s hand retreats hastily from her shoulder, hot with shame.

“Oh, Alexandra, forgive me.” The easygoing Russian lilt of the voice fills the room. “I didn’t realize you had _company_.” Amalia’s last word carries leisurely innuendo and a hint of surprise that Alex has a male guest at all.

Alex laughs weakly. She supposes her current position—kneeling on the floor in front of a man, because that’s what Strand is, isn’t he, just a _man_ —could be easily misunderstood by onlookers. She stands up, avoiding Amalia’s lascivious look.

“Amalia, this is Dr. Strand.”

“A pleasure, Doctor,” Amalia responds, and Alex can hear Strand’s title rolling off Amalia’s tongue in glee. Alex shoots her a glare and addresses Strand, who has also risen from his previous ( _not at all suspect_ ) position.

“Amalia did some research for the podcast in Russia. Tracking down Keith, Percival Black, you know.”

“Your missing freelancer friend?” Strand asks, stroking his beard. For a second Alex wonders if he’s kept the facial hair just so he can enjoy the (canned) sophistication of the action, before remembering that he’s become _conspiracy theories laid out on the walls with string_ crazy, and his scruffiness is merely a piece of the _I’ve-gone-nutty_ aesthetic _._

“The one and only, no longer missing.” Amalia smiles. “Alexandra, I’ll just be in my room.” She walks down the hall and shuts a door, leaving behind a heady air that intoxicates Alex.

“Your missing friend became your roommate,” Strand states, incredulous.

“Well, she’s visiting for just a little while,” Alex responds, at once uncertain how this gruff mess of a man found his way into her life as someone to defend her living arrangements to. But he has, and she’s become the sister curses of all-consuming empathy and curiosity made flesh.

“Speaking of visitors, do you even have somewhere to stay tonight?”

He starts as though he’s forgotten the basic need for shelter, his quest for truth trumping all his other bodily needs. Would Maslow be impressed, or gravely concerned?

“Amalia has the guest bedroom, but the couch is yours if you want it,” she offers. She almost suggests that he take her bedroom and she the couch, except she doesn’t want him to find the telling bottle of Ambien on her nightstand. Even in his mentally strained state, she doesn’t want him to see her weakness.

He consents, and plows on with updates on the investigation. Her bedroom is made a moot point as the hours tick onward. They spend the night as partners in crime: smothering the top of her coffee table with documents, stabbing her apartment walls with pushpins, suffocating her home with the weight of conspiracy. The violent chaos of her new interior design draws her in like a charismatic sociopath. She feels a sense of torrid kinship with Strand: the natural progression of an emotional involvement tinged with neurosis.

The romance of the danger of it all has seduced her. She falls head over heels.

###

Amalia sees less and less of her hostess in the days after Alexandra’s stone fox of a work colleague starts shacking up on the couch. She notices the evidence of the man’s influence overtaking the two-bedroom apartment, a conquistador come to stain every square centimeter of Alexandra’s peaceful home with the blood of conspiracy, the pandemic of paranoia. Alexandra crumbles like Tenochtitlan at the requests of her Cor _té_ s, a fifty-something man whose analytical eyes seem mismatched with the rest of his disheveled appearance.

What starts as some clutter on the coffee table metastasizes to the walls of the living room: a large map of the western US littered with blue and green pushpins, newspaper clippings dating back to Amalia’s days as a freelancer for PNWS, red string forming a spider web of shady connections between even shadier entities.

As much as Alexandra’s acquiescence to Strand concerns Amalia, she understands. She herself has been there before, and has felt those same feelings: The draw of a story so expansive and world-shaking that the need to dig deeper comes across as a moral imperative. That fundamental impulse of the reporter, the smoldering desire to _know_ even if she must suffer first-degree burns—that is the reason Amalia is staying ( _hiding_ ) in her friend’s nondescript Seattle apartment in the first place. There are people who have threatened her, people who have ransacked her home and chased her away from dark truths; and, her impulse for self-preservation ( _cowardice_ ) overtaking her, she ran away.

There is something deeply shameful about running away from a story. It twists in her side like a serrated knife, and it goes deeper each day she cowers behind the skirts of her friend.

So Amalia doesn’t feel she needs to say anything (doesn’t think she has the right) to pull her friend out of the whirlpool that is the manic Dr. Richard Strand. She doesn’t think Alexandra would even consider halting the investigation anyway. How such an amiable nature can coexist with the teeth-gritting, indefatigable mettle at the core of Alexandra’s constitution is a mystery to Amalia.

There’s something else, too, in the way Alexandra yields to Strand, how she considers his welfare first. It’s in how Alexandra puts the kettle on every time he arrives at the apartment (“He drinks tea,” Alexandra had told Amalia, when she offered to run out for coffee yesterday morning); and it’s in how Alexandra tidies his papers for him, consolidating scattered documents into neat stacks like they’re just old tax returns her silly partner was too lazy to file away.

In this respect—the clinical detachment required of journalists looking for _just the facts_ —Amalia has Alexandra beat. Amalia knows that emotions can sweep aside everything else aside. She learned long ago to leave her feelings at the door, keeping the (figurative) ninety-five theses of sacrosanct journalism ethics nailed there. It’s the only way she can get things done. It’s what makes her a hell of a reporter.

As the weeks speed by (and as Alexandra’s friend comes and goes like the stray dog Amalia used to leave food out for), Strand becomes the focal point of Alexandra’s universe. She orbits him like a planet, even when he’s out of town.

Unable to engage with Alexandra anymore, Amalia takes to spending time at the PNWS studio tormenting her adorable ex-boyfriend. His awkwardness around her is charming; she finds herself regretting the end of their relationship. She’s bad in relationships though: too independent, too flighty, her mother used to chide her. Amalia didn’t even bid farewell to Dominika before she fled the country. She effectively ended that eight-month relationship over text, a fourteen-hour flight away from a woman she might have even _loved_.

Amalia would never admit it, but she gets lonely sometimes. So she welcomes Nic’s company, relishes his internal tension between wanting to leave the room and avoid being impolite. Such a gentleman.

After she secures her 200 francs—and it’s not even the money she wants, it’s Nic’s cute stutter as he apologies and pays her interest on top of the sum—she gets to talking about her new roommates.

“This Strand fellow, he and Alexandra seem like they should be wearing tin foil hats half the time,” she jokes.

Nic sighs, and rubs his hand through his long sandy hair. “Yeah, they’re working on some project Alex won’t tell me much about.” His hand comes down from his hair to rest on his lap. It curls into a fist. “How has she seemed? Okay?”

Nic’s voice is flat and pleasant, but Amalia can recognize the faint tone of regret and brotherly concern behind it.

“She doesn’t sleep very well,” she answers honestly. “And, well, you know I positively adore Alexandra, but I wonder if she’s become a little too close to the story.”

Nic seems to freeze. “I kind of thought—well—I thought Strand might be trying to shape the story a little bit, but I never—”

For once, just for once, Amalia lets herself take something seriously. Even if she played with Nic’s heart like a cat scratches at a ball of yarn, even if she destroyed her relationship with Dominika, she owes Alexandra this. She owes herself this.

“She’s become emotionally compromised, Nic.”

That evening, while Alexandra’s out running down some new leads, Amalia takes her duffel bag and slips out. She’s running again. In her shame, she leaves only a yellow post-it note next to the bottle of sleeping pills in the medicine cabinet:

 _Good luck, Alexandra_.

###

Dr. Monique Bernier, one of the partners of the Seattle Sleep Institute, is a busy woman. She runs on a cocktail of lattes and protein bars. For a sleep doctor, her sleep habits aren’t quite up to snuff (her husband teases her when she sits up until midnight scrolling through news stories on her smart phone).

She greets Peter the receptionist, a doe-eyed eager-to-please kid just out of Whitman College, and thanks him as he hands her today’s schedule. She takes the clipboard and scans the list of patients. Her first appointment today is with Alex, a local girl made good via podcast fame. Monique laughs to herself, marveling at the effect of technology on modern culture. She’s a victim as much as anyone else: FitBit on her wrist, Android tucked into her pocket, Kindle resting in her purse.

Monique is a little shocked when Alex actually turns up for her scheduled appointment; the poor woman has had to reschedule the last two weeks, apparently bogged down in work. The puffy bags under Alex’s eyes do nothing to please Monique. There’s got to be some way to break through to this patient.

“Good morning, Alex.”

“Hi Dr. Bernier,” the journalist responds, pulling out her audio recorder. Monique isn’t quite sure she agrees with Alex broadcasting her personal information over the Internet, but maybe things work different when you’re the host of a nationally acclaimed podcast. She’ll talk it over with her husband, a stay-at-home dad who happens to be a _massive_ fan of The Black Tapes. Not that she’d ever disclose anything from Alex’s sessions that Alex didn’t already share with thousands of listeners.

“It’s recording now,” Alex says, giving off the same sort of skeptical disinterest she did in the first two sessions.

“So, has your sleep improved at all?”

“Well,” Alex draws out the one-syllable word, “not really, no.”

“Have the breathing exercises we went over helped?”

Monique takes note of Alex’s guilty face, the same expression Monique gives her dentist when he asks if she flosses daily.

“I haven’t had an opportunity to try it yet. I’ve been working late the past few weeks.”

Monique frowns, and Alex cowers from the motherly disapproval.

“One of the major causes of sleep issues is stress, Alex. You need to focus on managing your stress level, and if that involves setting hard and fast hours for work, then that’s something you need to do.”

“That might be difficult,” Alex answers cryptically.

“Is it something with your manager? I can write him a letter if you need it,” Monique offers, impudent at the idea that a supervisor would push someone so clearly unwell into greater stress.

“Oh no, it’s not my boss. It’s, well, not exactly personal, it’s definitely work-related, but it’s for a—for a friend.”

“A friend?” Monique asks. She’s curious what person would push his or her friend into the corner Alex has very apparently been shoved into. Though Alex is only a decade younger than her, Monique feels a sense of maternal protectiveness wash over her. “Wouldn’t a friend want you to get better?”

Alex fidgets in her chair. “I can’t exactly say no to him. It’s really important work.”

“Alex, please try to stay positive. Don’t say ‘I can’t.’”

Monique watches as Alex curls tighter into herself, shoulders hunched inward. She feels sorry for her.

“Look, if it’s late at night, you’re at home anyway, right? So when you are in your own home, you are the queen of your castle. You control what happens. I want you to focus on leaving your work at the workplace. I think that will help you budget your time better, and reduce your stress levels when you come home to sleep.”

“I—well—” Monique would think Alex’s face has become a faint pink, had she not already been so pale. “I can’t do that. He’s really—I mean, well—my friend and I do our work in my apartment.” Alex’s eyes meet Monique’s. “And he stays with me when he visits Seattle.”

Ah. A boyfriend. A poor partner indeed if he’s forcing Alex to stay awake, if he’s causing her this much stress. Monique feels a familial bond with Alex more than many of her other patients; something about Alex’s sweet but deer-in-headlights appearance inspires a sort of protectiveness for the woman. She doesn’t want to assume, but she knows she has to ask. Monique tries to make her office a safe space. It’s her job to guard her patients’ well-being.

“Alex, darling,” Monique murmurs, “all you have to do is talk him. I’m sure he would be perfectly happy to reschedule your work for a more reasonable hour. And if he refuses, well—” Monique pauses. “Would you mind shutting off the recorder?”

Alex frowns, but she taps the stop button on the device.

“Look, if there’s something going with your boyfriend, if he’s _hurting_ you in any way—”

Alex waves her hands in front of her face. “No, no, it’s nothing like that, not at all.”

“I’m serious, Alex. You’re safe here. You can talk to me.”

“He’s never hurt me, he’s never _touched_ me,” Alex declares, her response immediate, her face horror-stricken by the idea.

“Alex,” Monique takes Alex’s trembling hand, “he doesn’t have to touch you to hurt you.”

The scraping of Alex’s chair on the cool tile floor breaks the uncomfortable silence.

“I have to go,” she says, and she brushes out of Monique’s office.

Monique drops her hands on her lap, bona fide worry tossing in her stomach. She’ll be sure to have Peter call Alex and try to get her to book another appointment. Something’s going on in that poor woman’s life.

###

He tacks the latest clipping to the wall, his hands black from newspaper ink, and surveys his masterpiece: the deepest secrets of his life strung up on the walls of Alex’s apartment, a museum exhibit on the folly of Richard Strand. It bares his life to her. He feels like a frog with its skin stripped away so students can poke and prod at his insides.

Alex is looking at him instead of the conspiracy map that has engulfed her living room. Her worry lines really bring out the dark circles under her eyes. He finds it unnervingly pretty.

She hands him a mug of tea—loose-leaf, none of the Lipton rubbish she used to have—and he sits on the couch (it’s become his usual sleeping quarters, even though Alex’s roommate moved out of the guest bedroom two weeks ago).

“So what else did Nic find on this shell corporation?” he asks.

Alex shakes her head, and he can’t help but be annoyed. “Not much. We’re still looking into it.”

He sets the mug down on the floor, since the coffee table is coated with papers and photographs, and puts his head in his hands. The weight of the couch shifts next to him, and he feels her hand rubbing up and down his back. The soothing gesture lulls him into silence.

“Are you okay?” she asks, moon eyes wide with trepidation, innocent features offering herself as a support system.

The question infuriates him. Of course he’s not _okay_. No matter how many tragic songs spring forth from his heart, his Eurydice is lost, pulled down into the depths of the underworld because he didn’t trust her enough to not look back. Her terror-stricken face haunts him; the shame of that split-second he stood paralyzed in fear, unable to defend her, has haunted him since that day on the side of the coastal highway.

And now that he has a way to find his wife again, to rescue her from the land of demons, a different woman has dared to force her way into his life and fill the empty space Coralee left. He hates Alex for it.

But she’s the only ally he really has.

“What about the other lead in San Francisco?” he responds, stomping on her concern like a spider underfoot. Alex doesn’t take it well.

“You’re obviously not okay, Richard,” she spits at him, her fingers suddenly claws at his back. “Ruby texted me that you’ve been avoiding her calls, too.”

She rises, anger filling out her features. With a height advantage, she’s a fearsome thing to behold.

“Can’t you just pretend to give a _shit_ about the people who care about you? Why can’t you just let the people who lo—”

She stops herself short, clipping the end of the word like it’s a blasphemy she shouldn’t utter. Her eyes are watery.

She’s crying?

He reaches out for her hand in silent apology. She takes it and wrenches him up with strength a 125-pound woman shouldn’t have. There’s a vice grip on the back of his neck, warm breath on his face, and it takes him a few seconds to register that she’s kissing him.

Oh.

He can taste her hopelessness, her vulnerability, her rush at the release of pent-up feelings. He imagines if this had happened six months ago, when his simple infatuation with a bubbly (but nosy) reporter made him eager to meet up for coffee, more to see her pretty face than to listen to her opinions. It is only after the boyish attraction faded that he grew to respect her competence. This is what she is to him now: an intelligent co-conspirator that offers a second set of eyes and provides him connections he didn’t have before. Anything else will destroy him (and will destroy _her_ ). His world has already started to crack in places.

He pushes her away, but gently. He cups her face in his hand as a consolation prize.

“Alex, please,” he tells her. “If you want to help me, then focus on the investigation.”

“Of course. Sorry. Excuse me.”

She retreats to the bathroom, and he returns to surveying the walls. He’s going to find his wife.

###

The past four years at the Strand Institute have been an incredible experience. The pay and the lax dress code don’t hurt, and the subject matter of her work is fascinating too, but Ruby’s only stayed as a receptionist for so long because she adores her boss. A formal and intelligent man with a soft spot for his employees, Dr. Strand has always been exceptionally kind to her. So watching his slow descent into sickness has torn her up inside. She blames Alex Reagan.

At first it was the annoying and constant calls to the institute, before Dr. Strand finally agreed to meet her. Then it was the way her boss got sucked into Reagan’s sick game, how he lost his cool every time a call came through from the reporter. The last few months, though, were unforgivable: the careless prodding at Dr. Strand’s weak points, the almost willful way Reagan tore him down to the bare bones of a man who’d seen enough tragedy in his life. And now the doctor’s ignoring Ruby’s calls, which is something he’s _never_ done before.

It’s a shock when he turns up at the Chicago office. She feels like she hasn’t seen him in months. He’s the same and not the same: still unshaven and adorned in mopey-looking flannel, but with a more manic air about him.

“Dr. Strand?” she asks, her voice full of anxiety.

“Hi, Ruby,” he says. He seems distracted. “Did you get back to Jenna about the delay on the book draft?”

“Yeah. Hey, are you okay, boss?”

He sighs, and it’s like the weight of the world’s atmosphere leaves his body before he breathes it back in.

“I’ll be fine.”

He heads for his office, and Ruby trails him.

“What happened? Something with Alex?”

He looks at her wearily behind the thick lenses of his glasses.

“She’s—I don’t know. She’s losing focus.”

“You know, I can help you. Anything you need,” she offers, desperate for her boss to bring her back into his tiny circle of trusted confidants.

“Ruby, I can’t have you be a part of this.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

He exhales again. Ruby’s getting real sick of his ‘I know better than you do’ sighs. It’s a bunch of paternalistic bullshit.

“I thought that you thought better of me,” Ruby pleads.

“Ruby, it’s not that—”

“Look, boss, you’re obviously not okay, and _I want to help you_. Alex is in it for the story. You can’t _trust_ her.” Her voice is weak, but she’s begging him to see the light.

“Of course I can,” he says simply, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Four years of dedicated service, and she’s lost him.

“You’re just going to get hurt if you keep things up with her,” she tells him. “Isn’t the stuff you’re looking into dangerous?”

He doesn’t respond, so she goes for the throat, a pit bull set on defending her family from an interloper: “Look, if you trust her and care about her so much, wouldn’t it be better if you didn’t put her in danger?”

As quick as he came, he grabs his messenger bag and heads back to the entrance. He stops before the exit.

“Thanks, Ruby.”

Ruby finds herself alone in the Strand Institute’s lobby once again, wondering what the hell just happened.

###

Nic clicks his mouse, cutting off the end of a music track for the upcoming Black Tapes episode. He replays it, listening to the last lines of the theme song fade: _if you get there first / fly away, fly away_.

As the song fades, he hears raised voices muffled by his headphones. He pulls them off to hear Strand speaking to Alex in a heated tone. Nic turns around and catches sight of the two of them in Alex’s office. The door is ajar. He sees Strand’s hand on Alex’s shoulder. Strand lowers his voice to a level Nic can’t hear.

“Don’t fucking _patronize_ me,” comes a snarl from Alex, and then he hears her agitated breathing, like she’s upset. He hasn’t heard Alex cry in the office since she spilled coffee down the front of his shirt—her third day of work. He wasn’t mad then. He was almost amused at her sniffles as she helped him sop up the spilled liquid. It’s amazing how much Alex has hardened in four years. She’s no longer the girl who cries over coffee stains. She’s the woman who chases after demons as her day job.

“Alex, you _can’t_ keep doing this,” he hears Strand bite back, a harsh growl layered under his words. He hears Alex cry harder.

Nic has been stalked by shady CEOs, drugged by crazy cult members, denied information by formerly reliable sources, and terrified by tall shadows in the woods, all in the past two months. But this—someone hurting Alex, someone he values as family—is enough. He can’t stand it anymore.

And so it is that Nic, the passive and peaceful Canadian who is polite to a fault, who takes his shoes off so as not to track mud into the home of a criminal cult, storms into Alex’s office and sucker punches Dr. Richard Strand right in the face. There’s instant pain in his knuckles, visceral pain that he delights in as Strand holds his nose in an attempt to stop the bleeding.

“Jesus, Nic,” Alex hisses. He ignores her.

“Get _out_ ,” he says to Strand, unrepentant. If Strand presses charges, so be it. He won’t stand for Alex to be pushed around anymore.

Strand snatches the box of Kleenex and leaves Alex’s office. Nic turns to her.

“Are you okay?”

Alex frowns at him. “Nic, that was stupid.” She grabs her coat. “I need to go.”

He blocks her exit.

“Alex, what are you doing? He’s been manipulating you.”

She shakes her head, and he sees her: what she is, what she’s become. It breaks his heart.

“You love him?”

She gives him the smallest of nods and brushes past him, leaving him alone, a pacifist with blood dripping down his hand.

###

“Don’t follow me,” he says, still trying to stymie the gushing blood with tissues. “You should want nothing to do with me.”

“Don’t put words in my mouth,” she spits back at him. She tries to help him clean the blood, but he pulls away.

“Nic’s right. I’ve been manipulating you.”

It stings, to hear the truth come straight from his lips. The sour taste of betrayal leaves a rough aftertaste, but it’s not enough. The feelings control her now. This is who she is: a too-curious emotional mess who can’t stop chasing after him and his story.

“I know.” He arches his eyebrows in surprise. “At some level, I always knew. But it doesn’t matter, because I would’ve helped you anyway.”

She can’t detect a hint of emotion on his face (it doesn’t help that he’s holding a wad of bloody tissues against his nose). He’s trying to hide from her. She won’t let him this time.

“And you’re not the least bit concerned that this… ‘partnership,’ for lack of a better word, is a safety risk? For not only your physical well-being, but your mental faculties as well?”

“I’m aware of the risks.”

“And you don’t care that I’ve violated your trust?”

She pauses. “Well, that’s an issue. It’s a big one. But I think with some groveling we can get past it.” She smiles at him, a full, bright smile, one that hasn’t graced her face for months.

Wordlessly, he reaches for her hand, and she takes it. She can feel the jumble of emotions in the trembling of his fingers—guilt, fear, paranoia, despondency, and even a little delight?

He runs his thumb tenderly over her knuckles.

“Okay,” he says, his face a bloody mess. “Okay.”

Recognizing the danger, setting aside the romance of it all, she appreciates the simplicity of his response.

For better or worse, she falls head over heels.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is basically me trying to sort out my feelings about [my analysis of episode 202](http://surely-you-jess.tumblr.com/post/138578500873/black-tapes-202-strand-the-master-manipulator). I hope I did the situation justice.
> 
> [SapphireBryony/harpers_mirror](http://archiveofourown.org/users/SapphireBryony) made an [amazing aesthetic edit for this fic](http://harpers-mirror.tumblr.com/post/143303337216/she-crumbles-like-tenochtitlan-happy-unsound), in honor of [Unsoundiversary](http://surely-you-jess.tumblr.com/post/143274002083/unsoundiversary-master-post). Go check it out!


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